Massachusetts’ Question 2: Regarding Marty Walz’s Pro-Charter Reasonings
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On September 13, 2016, the Boston Globe reported on a UMass Boston debate concerning Question 2, a ballot issue that Massachusetts voters will face at the polls on November 08, 2016.
Representing the pro-charter set was former Massachusetts Representative Marty Walz (D- 8th Suffolk District), who is also senior advisor to Democrats for Education Reform in Massachusetts (DFER-MA). (For an informative, brief look at DFER, seethis post by Pennsylvania teacher and blogger Peter Greene.)
In this post, I respond to particulars related to Walz’s pro-charter-expansion stance.
Walz maintains that “local control …got us into this situation,” and by “this situation,” Walz means, “thousands of students are being left behind by their school districts.”
So, according to Walz, if Massachusetts rid itself of local control, then those “thousands of left-behind students” would no longer be “left behind.”
Indeed. Without local control, those students might conveniently and completelydisappear from any school roster.
Goodbye “left behind”; hello “gone.”
If Walz had her way, then there would only be individual, non-elected boards comprised of corporate and financial executives to oversee a school or a network of schools. So, if any students leave a school or network (whether encouraged to do so by that school/network or not), then the school (or network) responsibility ends there.
Massachusetts would be free to emulate Louisiana’s all-charter Recovery School District (RSD), a “portfolio” district (one where “there is no single entity responsible for all children”)– and one where assistant superintendent Dana Peterson publicly admitted that he doesn’t know how many students just disappear from those portfolio-ed, New Orleans schools.
But let us return to Walz’s sweep against local control of Massachusetts schools Massachusetts’ Question 2: Regarding Marty Walz’s Pro-Charter Reasonings | deutsch29: